


So That All May Be Accommodated

by leslielol



Category: Justified
Genre: Babies, Fatherhood, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-18
Updated: 2021-02-18
Packaged: 2021-03-13 16:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29529474
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leslielol/pseuds/leslielol
Summary: Raylan gets a call from an old friend who has a new friend, and then some.
Relationships: Raylan Givens & Tim Gutterson, Tim Gutterson/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 7
Kudos: 32





	So That All May Be Accommodated

**Author's Note:**

> When you're in an eight-hour online training session :) but it is literally nothing to do with your job :) you write fic for a show you desperately miss :) 
> 
> WARNING: Brief mentions of maternal mortality.

The motel Raylan’s watching is a flat-roofed, tuscan gold-painted, largely unremarkable little fixture. It’s a spell too far from the beaches to promise _ocean-views from every unit!_ but that’s what the half-blinking sign perched too-close to the crumbling cement curb boasts. 

There’s a man inside one such unit, Raylan believes, that’s got three decades’ worth of a rap sheet to his name. He’s been traversing across the United States, with partial sightings following his trail from Portland to Scottsdale to Birmingham and now, finally, Miami. Or Sunrise, to be precise. Raylan very much likes the idea of starting his weekend having bagged this fugitive who, while not among the top ten most wanted, is a known associate of number six. 

His view of the squat motel swims in a hot-wet heat. 

Raylan’s got his windows down, parked in a mechanic’s shop the next lot over, giving him a clear angle of the windows and doors opening up around a slimy swimming pool and the motel’s twelve-spaced parking lot. He doesn’t expect his man to move until he works his way through the gas station fare he’d walked in with. From the man’s file, Raylan figures he’ll hit a burger joint before nightfall. 

Raylan’s ansty for much the same reason: fed up with the wait they’d already put in, his own partner stepped out and walked a few blocks back to a strip mall in search of lunch. Raylan had asked for a vanilla cone, but doesn’t think it’ll survive the heat. 

His phone buzzes where he left it on the dashboard. He suspects a picture of a melted ice cream, but finds an incoming call. 

Tim Gutterson, he reads from the screen, and warms in a different way.

Raylan doesn’t often hear from Tim, and when he does it’s usually by text. The last few have been Kentucky wildlife--usually in the vein of skunks and possums--photographed in the dark, their eyes catching the flash and glaring white. They all come with some variation of the caption, _It’s like you never left._

Raylan narrows his sights on what he believes to be his fugitive’s car, and settles in. He and Tim have talked for hours about everything and nothing, neither tearing an eye away from their subject. Raylan suspects he can slide right back into that place, years-gone and mismatched-terrain be damned.

“Hey--”

_“How the fuck do you make a baby sleep.”_

Tim speaks with some urgency, and Raylan doesn’t quite catch the nature of his comment so much as the intent. He sits up a little straighter, as if he might bolt into action on Tim’s behalf. 

“Pardon?”

“I got one here. How do you make it sleep.” Raylan can hear the shrill noises of a fussy newborn. “It--he is clearly tired. But he won’t sleep. He ate, he burped. He’s supposed to sleep now, right?” 

Raylan hasn’t yet acclimated to the hair-trigger of Tim’s voice. He can count on one hand the times he’d known the man to sound panicked, and he doesn’t like that this one instance has suddenly run the length of all others combined. 

“Are you holding him?”

“I gotta--? Shit. Okay. One sec.” There’s rustling, a baby’s wail, and then Tim sounding tinny and distant. “You’re on speaker.” 

Raylan, assuming Tim is on some very unfortunate case, says quietly, “You ought to call CPS.” 

He’s seen a few runners who’ll leave behind girlfriends, wives, pets, children. Somehow cash and other ill-gotten gains always seem to find their way into the go-bag, but not the stroller.

“Can’t,” Tim huffs. 

Then, “He’s sort of… mine?” 

And quickly, “By association.”

Raylan’s first thought is heat stroke. He half-expects to come to six hours from now, in the dark, absent his fugitive. 

But the baby on the other line continues to whine, and Tim’s responding with a cautious mantra of _it’s okay, it’s okay_ and Raylan just can’t hold to his preferred excuse. 

“How the _fuck_ is he yours, Tim, _by any fucking means?”_

“He’s not,” Tim huries, sounding embarrassed in a way Raylan can’t remember from him at all. Tim doesn’t say anything else for a moment, and Raylan doesn’t press him. They are both focused on the baby’s cries, which are softening--slowly but surely--into little more than a murmur. 

The motel is unmoved. Raylan takes a swig from the can of coke he has in the car, grimacing at how flat it’s gotten. Reality and calm seem to circle them both, and settle. 

When Tim next speaks, he sounds resolutely calm in a way he is not. It’s an affectation he does with his voice, flattening it into the earth, pressing the tops and bottoms of syllables into a single plane. To do this, he shorts all emotion from his shared sentiment, giving nothing but the words themselves any pretence.

“This guy I’m seeing--who’s a fucking liar, by the way, ‘cause you know my thing for siblingless, parentless orphans--has a sister. Had. There were complications and she died during childbirth. James is her only next of kin.” 

That’s it, Raylan realizes after Tim again goes quiet. That’s the long and short of it. A boyfriend and his sister and the untenable mortality rate of young mothers in rural hospitals, and now this: a floundering Deputy U.S. Marshal and an infant in his care. There’s a great, ringing absence of anything else, any more detail or conditions to fill the void. 

“Shit,” Raylan says, and hears Tim hum in agreement. 

“Thomas James Aylmer. She named it after him.” Tim is so silent, Raylan suspects he’s entirely stopped breathing. “So there’s that… impenetrable layer of guilt.”

Raylan says nothing. He means to tease Tim, because that much is familiar--hell, it’s probably what Tim wants--but the situation doesn’t quite allow for all the things they might have said, were they younger men.

“Sway,” Raylan says. “With the baby. If you’re not. Get into a rhythm.” 

Tim doesn’t say that’s not something he has, and Raylan doesn’t tack it on so that they both know he’s well aware. It’s almost cordial. 

Raylan gives Tim a minute, and tries not to laugh when imagining the scene. 

“How long have you two been together?”

Tim makes a noise like he doesn’t know, then like he doesn’t want to say, before finally he relents and answers through a sigh, “Three years.”

“Jesus.”

“We own a house together,” Tim adds, the tone of his voice moving like he’s reading a rap sheet, each offense more damning than the last. 

“Christ Almighty!” 

A bubble of laughter finds its way out, surprising both Raylan and Tim. 

“It ain’t that funny,” Tim says shortly. “But. Yeah. I got up to all sorts of shit after you left.”

The smile Raylan feels forge itself ahead of his teeth tastes bittersweet. 

“Hope I wasn’t the one to hold you back.”

He says this because it feels like the thing to say, given how they’d carried on. 

Raylan remembers better how it started than how it ended: they’d been coming back late on some kind of errand--successful prisoner transport, most likely--when his Lincoln got a flat. The spare had been pumped full of bullet holes on some previous misadventure, so they’d found themselves waiting on the side of the road for a pick-up. “It’s hot,” Raylan had complained, and Tim hadn’t even looked sideways at him before replying, “Yeah. Want your dick sucked?” Raylan answered as if to call Tim’s bluff, though he’d never known Tim for bluffing.

They’d kept it going, off-and-on, and Raylan was three weeks in Miami before he finally felt that twinge of having lost something. _Fooling around_ is what it was, and not for lack of a better term. Tim seemed more amused by Raylan’s ease than anything, and proceeded as if razing Raylan in a more intimate position was equal to the goal of getting off. 

Now, Raylan supposes he misses it like he misses baseball and driving too fast on dirt roads: shit he used to do in Kentucky.

“Oh, I wouldn’t give you that much credit.”

Tim sounds pleased with himself, which Raylan finds he’s happy to hear. It’s like a shared joke, somewhere near about how Raylan’s Ruined Wednesdays and how a mistelling from Rachel suggested he was once robbed by chickens. It’s a soft, good sense of what they had, more a feeling than concrete memory.

Raylan listens as the baby whines and starts to fuss, then falls quiet. He imagines Tim is trying to sooth its passage from the warmth of his chest to the crib. 

“Babies can sleep on their stomachs, right?”

“Tim--”

“I’m kidding. Supine position. Googled it.” Tim’s quiet for a long while, as if he’s both surprised Raylan’s suggestion worked, and forgotten Raylan’s on the line at all. But then his voice returns, clear and present into the receiver, speaking his mind aloud: “I thought when people held babies for this it was because they wanted to.” 

Raylan feels that’s an awfully sad sentiment, but gathers Tim doesn’t, so he hedges. 

“Little of column A, little of column B.”

He gives Tim a moment to extricate himself from the area, to put a little distance between his turbulent future and this lifeline to the past. Raylan finds he hopes this call isn’t pure, unfiltered desperation, that maybe he still holds a place in Tim’s world that isn’t better left forgotten. Looking for a way to bridge the two, Raylan wants to ask _where’s the guy,_ but supposes there’s a singularly more pressing question. 

“Who’s the guy?”

He can’t picture it, and he knows why. If pressed by others Tim would talk about people he was dating--girls, it was assumed, and he never corrected anyone. Raylan knew better, knew Tim wasn’t lying when he claimed the scope of his insight into women was a glossy page in a life sciences textbook outlining the reproductive system. If Raylan hadn’t known firsthand how well Tim sucked cock, he’d have said the man had never known intimacy with another human being. 

“You know Chris, from IT?”

Raylan barks a laugh. “It’s Chris?”

“No, man, I tried to fuck Chris but he wasn’t having it. James was his college roommate.” 

Tim gives some static explanation, spelled out in such a tone that--again--Raylan can’t figure the truth from the absurd lies. A Super Bowl party, really? It’s all very cozy, and Raylan wonders just how much has well and truly changed.

He supposes there’s one such barometer for that. 

“Are you… out at work?” 

It’s not the kind of terminology he feels fits with Tim, who isn’t sincere about anything, least of all himself. There were moments Raylan saw something real about Tim: his ability to take a shot, to mark a threat, to welcome trouble. Those were real and true, but sincerity is a different animal. Raylan can only best point to its total absence, and he recalls rolling up to Tim in that Harlan tent church, Colton Rhodes spilled dead at his feet. Tim hadn’t looked sorrowful so much as empty. Raylan remembers collecting the erstwhile whore and leaving Tim to collect himself. The man simply wasn’t all there, and Raylan knew in his gut that he didn’t want to touch something so half-formed. 

But the answer is abrupt and simple, and Tim himself is fully in it. “Yeah.”

Raylan would rather close his eyes and really focus to take stock, but he’s still got a motel to keep an eye on. He splits the difference and squints, like he can fathom what Tim’s life has become if he puts it on the horizon, allows the drifting sun to spark and illuminate it. 

“Well shit, Tim, let me see if I can account for the facts here: you got yourself a partner, a house, have learned to share a modicum of your personal life with those around you,” Raylan finds he’s grinning as he talks, because by any measure, it’s a tidy sum, and not the kind of thing a man lucks into. Tim’s got all this because--in some way or another--he wants it. 

“And, sure, the baby was a surprise, but you probably got the square footage for one. So what’s the problem?”

Tim’s a stunned kind of quiet, like he can’t believe Raylan’s question isn’t rhetorical. 

“I can’t have a kid, Raylan.” He sounds tired, maybe even a shade sad. Realizing this, he changes course, cools his tone to add dryly, “I am not a nurturing, caring human being.”

“Hey, now, I only said that because it was true.” Raylan thinks he sees the door of one of the motel units open, but it’s just a smudge of shifting cloud cover overhead. “How long have you had the little stranger?”

He hears a fridge open and close, then open. He hears the whir of artificially cool air and imagines Tim’s just standing in its way, trying to feel something other than unmoored.

“About a week,” Tim says. “But I guess he’s like two weeks old now? He’s so fucking small.”

Even though it was Tim who called, Raylan realizes he doesn’t especially want to talk, so the onus is on Raylan to figure around what it is Tim’s still at odds with, now that the baby is quiet. 

“How’s James feel about all this?”

“It’s all wrapped up with his sister, so, not great?” The fridge closes again, for a final time. “But. He’s not a shitty person. He signed the paperwork from CPS. He’s gonna do this.”

Even in his own telling, Tim seems in awe of that. 

After a moment’s consideration, Raylan decides he’s not sure why that is. 

“You could do it too, Tim. If you want.” 

There’s a particular kind of silence Tim carries with him. It’s deft, like an instrument he’s tended to with practice and care. He holds all of himself in, communicating instead through clandestine winks and nods. Raylan’s always wondered what would happen if it went on too long, if the silence wouldn’t turn to tinnitus and, finally, an eldritch screech. 

It’s a quiet so deeply held because Tim himself is _in it._ He assumes space there, and retracts from it at his own pace. 

“It ain’t like I think I’m too young for this,” Tim says, finally breaking the spell. “Just that I am categorically underqualified. Not unlike yourself.”

“Hey, I’ve done alright. Willa’s hardly shown any miscreant tendencies.”

“Mazel Tov.” 

Raylan wants to say all Tim has to do is protect the kid, in ways he knows now and ways he’ll figure out. He thinks it’s corny, though, like something Art might say. 

But then, he thinks maybe Tim called Raylan because he couldn’t bring himself to call Art. 

So Raylan says it, corny and all. He waits a beat, asks, “You need me to say it again slow, so you can write it down?”

“S’not one of your wittier observations,” Tim mumbles. “I think I got it in one.” 

He sounds resigned, Raylan thinks, and doesn’t hesitate to ponder as to which way he’s gone.

Another shadow passes over the car, but it’s joined with the rapping of knuckles against the window, and Raylan’s partner, Omar, dipping his balding head in. Raylan motions to the phone, and forgives the lack of a vanilla cone, because the cuban sandwich wrapped in waxy brown paper he gets handed smells incredible.

“You’re gonna do fine, Tim,” he says. He means it like it’s the last he intends to say on the matter, though Raylan hopes--again, no better term--that Tim won’t relegate him back to a single point of contact of half-assed nature photography and roadkill. 

He finds his stomach roiling hot--like excitement, except none of this is his to be excited for. 

Except, isn’t it?

“I’d trust you with my life any day of the week. Fact is, I have. Guarantee you an infant won’t get up to half the shit I did. Least not for a while.” Raylan can’t be sure he isn’t posturing now--for Tim, for himself, hell--for Omar. All this now hinges on the notion that there can be goodness borne of compromise and upset, and that cruelty ends where the bearer chooses. 

“And that’s all you’re really doing, here. You look out for your partner and your kid, and you’re golden. Figure with your track record, this’ll be easier.” 

He can practically hear the smirk twisting its way around Tim’s mouth. He’s sure Tim’s dropping his head some to hide it. 

“Yeah, that’s what Rachel told me. I was hoping to hear otherwise.”

“Sorry to disappoint.” Raylan feels something come loose in his chest. Whatever this is, whatever side he’s assumed in the midst of another man’s existence, he’s won. 

“You know,” he says, suddenly compelled, “I don’t even think of him?”

Tim says nothing. He hears Raylan answering for that unspoken question between them, that ugly barbed tether they each see threaded throughout the title they now hold. 

For as much as their fathers had in common, they didn’t get spoken of in collective terms. Raylan remembers just the once, near the end of their whole thing, when Tim was drunk and cotton-mouthed, holed up in Raylan’s ancestral home. Of his first meeting with Arlo, Tim admitted being spooked: _“Seein’ him was like seeing a ghost.”_ Raylan had stared hard at him, upset but not, and said, _“Well. Now they’re both dead.”_

Raylan cuts Tim off, unburdening him from any admission to the contrary.

“Keep me updated, alright? I’ve got to go chase a fugitive around a gator farm. Why don’t you, I don’t know, practice swaddling a bag of flour?”

“Yeah, just rub it in why don’t you.” 

“I’ll send you some gator jerky.”

“Promises, promises.” 

“Alright. Tell the little tyke Uncle Raylan says hey.”

“Fuck you forever, Raylan.” 

Raylan leaves the call smiling. He can’t say as much for Tim, who’s pretending so hard to be annoyed that he might keep that way. Raylan guesses he’ll need to sit in another vat of silence with his decision. 

“Friend of mine,” Raylan says by way of explanation, and finally sets upon the cuban. “Just had a kid. Scared _shitless.”_

Omar is halfway through his own and has an eye on the motel.

“Oh boy. His first?”

“Mhm. By immaculate conception, no less.”

Omar heaves an exaggerated sigh. 

“I know you think you’re making a joke, but for who, Ray?” Omar, being from the very respectable Midwest, isn’t as thrilled as most by Raylan’s backwoods charms. He raises his eyebrows and repeats pointedly, “Gator farm?”

“You tell me that motel pool ain’t near enough to a swamp.” 

Not a minute later, Raylan gets a text. 

It’s from Tim, and amid the litany of child-bearing possums and skunks adopting a defensive posture before it, is the infant: small and pale with a shock of dark hair sweeping around his little head. He’s dressed in a grey onesie, laid on white-and-blue-striped sheets, measured by the length of two mass market paperbacks placed end-to-end. It’s the same book, Raylan realizes: two copies of _The Fellowship of the Ring._ He figures Tim and James each own a copy, and neither was willing to part with their own when moving in together. Tim must not realize this, because he writes, _[He’s not even the full trilogy yet.]_

 _[Just don’t read him that nerd shit]_ Raylan writes back. 

_[Course not. Have to start with the Hobbit]_

By dusk, Raylan gets his man.

By nightfall, Tim gets his, and Raylan finds himself included in a group text which debuts with a singularly awkward photo of Tim holding the child. His big hands are spidered about the body, careful not to let any part of him go unattended. His lips are pursed in some sugar-free manifestation of a smile, but where he can’t quite master the showmanship of joy, the first hints of it are held in his eyes, where his gaze rises to fix upon the man taking the picture. It’s nothing like Raylan remembers being looked at, himself, so he doesn’t let himself ache for losing it. 

_[Okay, assholes. Behold.]_


End file.
